In the 1970s, Gene Hackman portrayed a very American sort of exceptionalism, lending his flesh to characters possessed by a thrilling and dangerous gusto, who were often stunned that their efficacy could be called into question, that their best punch could be taken and returned. Some of my favorite Hackman performances are the strangest ones from that period, from the titles that became famous (The Conversation) to the ones that did not (Prime Cut, Night Moves). In a wonderful Grantland piece, Steve Hyden offers up a career retrospective on one cinema’s best stars. An excerpt:

I was searching for a thread in Hackman’s movies, and for a while I wasn’t sure I’d find one. Unlike his contemporaries Dustin Hoffman and Robert Duvall — Hackman’s running mates in the late-’50s/early-’60s New York City theater scene, and the other defining examples of the “not quite a leading man, not quite a character actor” type — Hackman didn’t have passion projects. When Hackman had the clout to function as the reigning auteur on set, he chose not to take advantage. He instead approached the material as a craftsman-for-hire — speak the lines as written, get the story across, execute the take, cash the check. When asked by GQ in 2011 what he wanted his epitaph to be, Hackman was customarily humble: “He tried.”

Nevertheless, there is a thematic link in Hackman’s movies, and it doesn’t square with the word most often used to describe him: Everyman. On the contrary, Hackman played exceptionalists — cops, lawyers, coaches, military leaders, heads of industry, Lex Luthor. For more than 30 years, people bought movie tickets to watch Hackman take charge. He was a molder of men: Hackman taught Redford how to ski, DiCaprio how to shoot, and Keanu how to play quarterback.

As the culture’s perspective on Great White Males changed, so did cinema’s view of Hackman. If you want to chart how attitudes about power shifted in the late 20th century, Gene Hackman movies are a good place to start. His filmography unfolds as a treatise on how authority is established, then corrupted, then dissolved.

In the Watergate-weary ’70s, Hackman was a capable man called on to fail, again and again. Popeye Doyle in The French Connection kills a fellow cop and lets Fernando Rey evade capture. Harry Caul in The Conversation is duped by his own surveillance and allows his client to be murdered. In the underrated noir Night Moves, Hackman is private detective Harry Moseby, who is lied to by everybody and seems resigned to it; when his wife, who is cuckolding him, asks who’s winning the football game he’s sullenly watching, Moseby says, “Nobody, one side’s just losing more slowly than the other.” Even in Scarecrow, Hackman’s personal favorite of his films, the one in which he plays a penniless drifter named Max Millan, Hackman loses the one thing he has: the adoration of his friend, Lion (Al Pacino), who winds up getting institutionalized right before the pals can realize their dream of opening a car wash.•